From left, Koichi Sato, Teruyuki Kagawa and Masato Sakai in Takashi Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western Django.”

Sergio Leone Meets Reservoir Dog in Japanese Pastiche

“Sukiyaki Western Django,” the latest offering from the protean and
prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike, is a feast for genre fetishists, a loving and lurid pastiche of the spaghetti westerns that were themselves lurid pastiches of classic Hollywood cowboy pictures. It is fitting that the honorary master of ceremonies at this film-geek orgy is Quentin Tarantino, dean of the international film-geek fraternity, who elegantly disembowels a snake in the opening scene and who appears later to fill in some plot holes and speak in bizarrely accented English.

His manner of speech is no stranger than anyone else’s in the movie, but it is perhaps a little more puzzling, since nearly everyone else in the movie is a Japanese actor speaking in a stylized version of the idiom of the Old West. Mr. Tarantino for his part sounds like a samurai from Texas. Or something.

Not that linguistic authenticity, or any other kind, has anything to do with “Sukiyaki Western Django,” the gleeful cosmopolitanism of which is summed up in its jazzy, nonsensical title. The original spaghetti-slingers dubbed English dialogue into the mouths of their international casts, and Mr. Miike has taken the further step of allowing his performers, in effect, to dub themselves into English.
Their sometimes awkward readings — of lines like “Don’t you reckon we’d better high-tail it?” — emphasize the demented artificiality of the movie, which concerns a feud, hidden treasure and a gunslinger who comes to town for money and sticks around to see that justice prevails. An acknowledged source is Sergio Corbucci’s “Django,” a raw, ripe 1966 Italian western, but there are also references to Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” Rambo and plenty of other high- and low-cultural touchstones.



The run-down local saloon, you may notice, is called Eastwood’s, and the hero (Hideaki Ito), a taciturn marksman with no name, is a campier, less haunting cousin of the many gaunt and solitary riders Clint Eastwood has played over the years. This lone avenger strolls into a desolate mountain town to find the place gripped by a feud between the Genji, who dress in white, and their red-clad rivals, the Heiki. In the middle are two women (Yoshino Kimura and Kaori Momoi), the mother and grandmother of a small boy whose mixed heritage is symbolized by the red-and-white roses growing on his father’s grave.



Those flowers are one of a few lyrical touches in an otherwise grindingly violent film. That the violence is often treated as sanguinary slapstick is not a problem in itself; turning mayhem into a joke is an expected feature of the self-conscious genre-blending formula Mr. Miike follows here. And some of the gags, notably the contortions of Teruyuki Kagawa, who plays the hapless, unreliable and all-but-indestructible sheriff, are gruesomely funny. But more often there is a frantic, compulsive quality to the action. Fanboy intoxication with the idea of formal ingenuity too often stands in for the thing itself.



For a while the weird color scheme and the tongue-in-cheek evocation of various traditions of popular cinema are amusing. But long before the final blood bath arrives the movie has made its point, which is essentially that Mr. Miike has a lot of energy and an extensive collection of DVDs.



“Sukiyaki Western Django” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for extreme violence.



SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO



Directed by Takashi Miike; written by Masaru Nakamura and Mr. Miike; director of photography, Toyomichi Kurita; edited by Taiji Shimamura; music by Koji Endo; production designer, Takashi Sasaki; produced by Hirotsugu Yoshida and Toshinori Yamaguchi; released by First Look Studios. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes.



WITH: Quentin Tarantino (Ringo), Hideaki Ito (Gunman), Masanobu Ando (Yoichi), Koichi Sato (Kiyomori), Kaori Momoi (Ruriko), Yoshino Kimura (Shizuka), Yusuke Iseya (Yoshitsune), Takaaki Ishibashi (Benkei) and Teruyuki Kagawa (the Sheriff).

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